Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Decoration Day at west Texas graveyards
September 3, 2003

“It’s Decoration Day! The crops have been laid by, but the hay isn’t ready for baling. Everybody is coming home to tend to the graves.” Until World War II Decoration Day was a big thing in small rural towns all over America, back before the days of “perpetual care.” In some localities Decoration Day was held in late May, but in other towns it occurred during late June and July during a lull in farm activities.

For several weeks before the big day, the women folk stitched up new outfits of dotted swiss, voile, pique, and batiste. Everybody had to look stylish as they cleared the graves of weeds, planted new plants next to family member graves, or put up ornamental iron fences around the family plot, or remounded the dirt over the graves. The womenfolk also saved some peas from the spring garden, dug up new potatoes for potato salad, and baked cream pies and cornbread. Jelly-making was already in full swing, so the prettiest jars were saved for the big day, too.

Deborah and I, as we wander about west Texas, stop at cemeteries. We like to look for unique gravestones, for old varieties of treasured plants, the incredible artistry of some of the wrought iron fencing, and whatever else might tell us a story about how people lived and died. In the Snyder cemetery we found incredible gravestones made of fossilized wood that glowed with deep rich colors, and some of the most intricate ironwork we have yet found. We first discovered the giant concrete tree stump markers of the Woodmen of the World fraternal organization in the Claremont cemetery, as well as examples of bare dirt plots with mounded graves. In Big Spring’s Mt. Olive cemetery and the Taos cemetery we admired incredible arrays of plastic flowers. Down at Stiles the numbers of graves of children that died in the flu epidemic of 1918 saddened us.

Recently we stopped at the Roby and McCaulley cemeteries while on the way to Albany to admire all of the architecture of the old houses and businesses of the town, and to visit the Old Jail Art Museum and Ft. Griffin. At the Roby cemetery we found several graves with collections of toys on a child graves, and found redbud trees planted near many graves. We stopped at McCaulley’s cemetery because Brandon Young, a cultural anthropologist that worked at the Sibley Nature Center in 2001 and 2002, had give two eulogies in a week at the site. After his grandmother died an uncle that lived in the backwoods of Fisher County had collapsed while preparing for the funeral. Like so many west Texans, all of his kinfolk now working in the oil fields originally came from farms in the breaks of the Brazos River headwaters during the Great Depression and the long drought of the 1930s.

He was the first to tell us of the tradition of Decoration Day. “From the research that I’ve done, it appears that the remounding of the dirt over the graves and scraping of the burial plots is an African tradition that became wholly accepted by the dominant Anglo culture of the deep south.” Other folk traditions are easily observable in small cemeteries– for example, graves are often on an east-west axis, with the feet of the deceased to the east. “Christ is expected to rise in the east, and the newly risen should be facing the Lord,” I heard years ago, from a traveling small-town Church of Christ preacher.

In the early 1800s, the “Rural Cemetery Movement” established a template for cemeteries – graves and memorials amid beautiful foliage in rustic surroundings. The tops of hills were often chosen as a site, partly for the sweeping and encompassing view as a way to invoke “a closeness to heaven,” and also to prevent the graves from becoming waterlogged. Many small cemeteries have an arched iron gateway. In England, centuries ago, mourners waited with the casket gathered at the gate to the cemetery, for the arrival of the clergy. The gate became known as the “litchgate, ” or the “corpse gate.”

Evergreen trees and shrubs are often planted in cemeteries, their ever-present foliage a symbol of eternity. Irises and what are now called antique roses are often found in regional cemeteries. The Roby cemetery had several plantings of “12 Apostles” crinum, a pink-white blooming bulb that is often found in the older districts of the small towns of our area.

Decoration Day had another purpose besides the maintenance of the graveyard where loved ones’ remains rested. The gathering helped families and communities preserve the oral histories of home. Before the work started, as everybody in the community gathered, an hour of visiting occurred – with the stories of the past year being entered into collective memory. Then everyone would walk about the cemetery in family groups, telling stories of their loved ones, and the people that had affected their lives. As people worked all morning, more stories were told within the family.

At the noon meal, the stories were told as part of reaffirming the unity of the community, while folks ate on long tables set up in shade just outside of the grounds of the cemetery. (If food was brought into the grounds, it was considered contaminated by its contact with death.) Decoration Day activities were a source of reaffirmation, reestablishing a sense of contact with the identity and uniqueness of those buried within. The mourners could imagine a sense of presence of the departed, with the feeling of reunion an end result.

My grandmother went to her husband’s grave at Resthaven at least once a month for almost 20 years. I have a memory of her “introducing” me to him – she told him I was a good boy. Several members of that side of the family have told me that I remind them of him. I first heard stories about him during those visits as we stood around feeding the ducks at the little pond near the entrance. As the wife of a “boomer,” having lived in at least a dozen different towns, my grandfather’s grave gave my grandmother a “permanent spiritual home” where she found spiritual renewal and a sense of comfort and security in the place that represented the passage to eternity.

Decoration Day ended with at least one sermon from a local preacher, with attendees often “rededicating their lives” as tears flowed. Small rural villages experienced a communal emotional release as a result of the day’s activities, which sometimes resulted in feuds being ended, and past inter-family transgressions forgiven. In retrospective analysis, Decoration Day had much in common with the still celebrated Mexican tradition of “El dia de los Muertos,” or the “Day of the Dead” on November 2nd and 3rd of each year.